Ran Chen - A Private Life

This discovery made me feel very strange.

Just at this time Mrs. Ge, the neighbor in front of us, developed breast cancer. Some people said that she had discovered a hard lump when she was washing herself. Others said that her husband had first found it on a wet night when the mugginess and the pervasive sound of the rain wouldn't let him sleep. With nothing else to do, he started gently caressing his wife and eventually felt the irregularity. After that, she was taken to the hospital, given a number of tests, and eventually diagnosed as having cancer.

I heard my mother say that she had already undergone massive surgery, with the doctor cutting out both her breasts as if they were nothing more than persimmons on a tree, as well as most of the associated lymph glands in her armpits. And that in the oppressive summer heat, the intense pain and feeling of suffocation experienced by this woman, with her breasts removed and her bosom, flat as a cutting board, bound in bloody gauze, stemmed from mental as much as from physical pressures.

Mother also said that even though Ge was going through this suffering, she would die fairly soon anyway, because the cancer cells had already spread, though she herself did not know this.

Lying on my little bed in my room that night, I was deeply frightened by the indistinct sounds of Mrs. Ge's moaning coming from the front of the courtyard. The rustling of the trembling leaves, which sounded like it was right beside me, seemed to be responding to her cries. Filled with dread, I put my hand on my chest and started exploring.

And sure enough, I found a hard little lump just under the nipple of one of my newly developing breasts. Moving to the other one, I found a similar little lump. With this, I was overwhelmed with fear.

I tossed and turned all night, unable to sleep, imagining that, like the lady next door, I was about to die.

According to Mother, dying was a total destruction of life. There is no other kind of leaving that carries us as far away; there is no other kind of renunciation that is as final; there is no other kind of forsaking of relatives and friends that is as thoroughgoing. Death is the irreversible termination of life.

Lying on my bed, I felt like I had been forced to don long, brocade burial robes, which try as I might I could not take off. I stared through the window at a night sky that was as clear as a limpid blue pool, while my heart sent blasts of tropical heat and arctic cold racing through my veins. I didn't want to renounce anything; I didn't want to forsake my mother, nor Widow Ho, whom I liked so much. Why would I want to die? Of course, being able to get away from Mr. Ti and my father was the one thing that made death attractive to me. But still, I didn't want to die.

I didn't dare go into my parents' room to wake them, so I lay there alone, a victim of my mind's wild imaginings.

… Hearing about death was like listening to some ear-piercing musical instrument, the sound as shrill as glass or as hard as metal. With one click of the latch, the door would be shut, and I would be forsaken by the world around me.

At that moment, my corpse dropped abruptly out of the darkness onto the bed beside me and lay next to me as cold as ice. I rolled away from her and looked at her huge eye sockets in the obscuring darkness, but those despairing eyes refused to look at me. Her lips moved ceaselessly, but she refused to talk to me. She was sneezing repeatedly, but the sound was very strange. Her sneezes sounded like those of our former dog, Sophia Loren.

After a while she got so restless that she got up from the bed and started pacing back and forth in the room, like a shadow moving along a wall. Her intangible image flickered waveringly with no apparent left or right or front or back, seeming to move in a space of infinite dimensions. Whatever she wanted to see, she could see.

After strolling about the room alone for some time, my corpse came up to me. Suddenly she smiled and asked how I was. She said that she didn't like graves, that she liked to wander through cedar forests. For some reason, I wanted to reach out and touch her bosom to see if she was still breathing, but when I did so I discovered that she did not have breasts. I was filled with terror, but at the same time couldn't bring myself to ignore or abandon her…

Only when the sky began to lighten did I finally drop off into a fitful sleep.

In the morning, Mother was astonished when she came in to get me up and saw how pale and distraught I was. She couldn't understand how such a change could take place in just one night.

Putting her hand on my forehead, she asked, "Niuniu, are you sick?"

I said, "Mama, is the lady next door going to die?"

This perplexed Mother even more. She had no idea what had happened.

I said, "Mama, I'm going to die too. I've got cancer too." Then I started to cry, my tears gushing down like a midsummer deluge.

Mother started examining my breasts, and indeed found what seemed to be a hard little lump. I pulled back, saying, "It hurts."

In disbelief, Mother said, "Who ever heard of a child having breast cancer?" But even as she said it she started to look upset.

That morning I didn't go to school as usual, because Mother took me to the hospital.

At that time there were no physiology classes in school, so we were not like today's adolescents who learn about the sexual development and maturity of, and differences between, males and females in their regular sex education classes. Although I was almost the same height as my mother, my awareness and knowledge of sexuality were abysmal. My mother refused to accept that I was growing up and continued to treat me as a child.

In the obstetrics ward at the hospital, most of the women coming and going were expectant mothers with stomachs swollen like drums. One woman about to give birth was stretched out face upward on a high, hard bed. Her bare stomach looked like a huge white drum that had been pumped so full of gas that it was ready to burst. A middle-aged male doctor was pressing here and there all over her stomach as he asked her questions. I was waiting off to one side, terribly afraid that her stomach would split from the pressure of his hand.

When it was my turn, Mother took great pains to explain my condition to him.

He had a very thin face, wide-set eyes, and a very offhand manner. His thin face made his large mouth look huge, which only served to make his disapproval more obvious.

I was too bashful to undo my blouse in front of a strange man, but since he asked me to, I did so. Very casually, but with meticulous thoroughness, he felt my breasts; then he laughed at my mother as if mocking her and said, "There's nothing wrong with her. She's entering puberty."

My mother said, "But she says she has some pain."

A bit impatiently, the doctor said, "You're a woman, surely you've gone through puberty yourself. This is quite normal."

After that, perhaps realizing how he had behaved, he asked in a friendly tone, "How old is she?"

Mother told him.

He replied, "She's noticeably thin for a girl her age. You should make sure she eats more nutritiously."

The examination for my "illness" over, both Mother and I heaved a sigh of relief as we left the antiseptic-laden air of the hospital.

In the little shop at the hospital entrance, in an instant response to the doctor's admonition, Mother bought me a bottle of yogurt and a ham sausage to make sure I ate more nutritiously, as if I would start getting fat the moment I ate them.

I was eating all the way home.

As I walked, images of Widow Ho's pale breasts, like a pair of plump peaches, hovered vaguely in my mind.